A grieving family has taken issue with a postal service mail carrier who stepped over a collapsed man to deliver mail, and did nothing to help the victim.

The mail carrier said he thought the fallen man was a mannequin set out as a Halloween decoration.

It’s a tragic situation, to be sure, and it’s impossible to know if the carrier could have helped 46-year-old Dale Porch, who was returning home after working a shift for the Regional Transportation District when he collapsed on the steps of his Denver home.

The tool can use some refining so that parents and students can, for instance, better tailor their searches geographically. Nevertheless, we applaud DPS for reaching out to the community to show what the district has to offer.

What some national columnists and bloggers thought about Tuesday night’s second presidential debate, in Hempstead, N.Y.:

America should have access to contraceptives,” and, on immigration, he said the children of illegal immigrants “should have a pathway to become a permanent resident of the United States.” After a primary battle in which GOP candidates tried to out-tough each other on immigration, Romney said that he was in agreement with President Obama and that “I’m not in favor of rounding up people.” The conservatives’ complicity seems to be driven by two things: a belief that Romney’s moves to the middle are mere feints, shifts more in tone than in substance; and an acceptance that Romney’s rhetorical reversals are necessary if he is to deny Obama a second term.– Dana Milbank, Washington Post Writers Group

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney couldn’t match his soaring first debate performance in a rematch with Barack Obama … but considering it was often a two-on-one, he didn’t do that poorly either. A big storyline for conservatives was moderator Candy Crowley, who injected herself into the mix to aid Obama. But a bigger story should be how she used a contrived Townhall setting to pick predominately slanted and loaded questions about the “evils” of guns, unfair pay practices and a mass imagined “outsourcing” of American jobs from our cast of allegedly undecided voters. Almost all questions played to Obama’s advantage, though few were especially relevant to this election.– David Harsanyi, Human Events

Not a close call. President Obama won the second presidential debate as clearly and decisively as he lost the first. For anyone who disagrees, three simple words: “Please proceed, Governor.” This icy invitation to Mitt Romney came amid an exchange about the killings of State Department officials in Libya. Obama noted that in his initial Rose Garden remarks, he classified the attack as an act of terror. Romney, perhaps misinformed by the right-wing propaganda machine, tried to insist that the president waited weeks to call the incident terrorism. “Get the transcript,” Obama said. Moderator Candy Crowley stepped in and noted that Obama was correct. (Indeed, according to the transcript, Obama classified the attack as among “acts of terror” that would not deter or deflect U.S. foreign policy.) Having embarrassed himself, Romney had the good sense to move on. It was a moment that encapsulated what Obama accomplished Tuesday night: He punched hard, and he punched with facts.– Eugene Robinson, Washington Post Writers Group

Just as important as the results in the instant polls was the fact that the overwhelming majority of the pundits proclaimed the President the victor. Even Charles Krauthammer and Laura Ingraham said that he won on points. With this type of unanimity, the media narrative for the next few days, which is at least as important as the debate itself, will run in favor of Obama and against Romney. The G.O.P. candidate, rather than being praised for having delivered a strong indictment of Obama’s economic record—the CBS News poll showed that sixty-five per cent of viewers thought he won the economic exchanges, against just thirty-seven per cent who thought Obama did—will be criticized for his blunders on Libya, guns, and women. (Amy Davidson has more on those.)– John Cassidy, The New YorkerRead more…

The much-anticipated 2012 Great American Beer Festival kicks off today, and beer aficionados are revving their engines.

The event, which began in 1982, has grown in popularity and this year, 578 breweries will pour more than 2,700 beers at the fest. Held at the Colorado Convention Center, it showcases diverse craft beers.

It’s good to see such enthusiasm, but we hope it will be tempered with wisdom when it comes to making the decision about whether to drive home.

Walmart opponents in the vicinity of Ninth and Colorado have earned the right to gloat a bit today in the wake of news that the company is abandoning an attempt to locate a store at that location. Taxpayers have every right to push back against the use of tax-increment financing that supports a development they dislike. Opponents did so in this case, and they won.

Some of those responses were civil and intelligent, and resulted in fruitful exchanges. For example, one woman explained she does not believe that any anchor, let alone Walmart, is a given, arguing that “the formula of ‘Shopping/Strip Mall + Anchor(s)’ is a tired and uninspiring development choice .. [and] a missed opportunity for our vibrant city.”

And if an anchor is necessary, she continued, she wants
“a walkable, attractive project” perhaps with “daily living stuff – like a Post Office, a Library, a Park, a Rec Center, a Movie theatre…”

Fair enough. I don’t know whether such a vision is financially feasible, but it’s a serious critique and an appealing vision.

Less serious were the snotty responses confirming my thesis than a number of the opponents have an excessively high opinion of themselves and their personal virtue as compared to the person they envision as the typical Walmart shopper.

And as if to reinforce my point, this newspaper published an article by a prominent Walmart opponent who complained that she’d “heard Walmart brings crime with it,” adding that an unnamed police officer “explained that Walmart is full of easy-to-steal stuff. Drug users in need of quick money steal it.”

Now, you might object that any Big Box or department store is full of easy-to-steal stuff, but she had an answer for that, too. Walmart may not be as vigilant, she implied, because “perhaps Walmart keeps prices low by cutting security expenses.”

It’s a sign of our times, isn’t it, that a phrase out of a big event catches the public imagination and spawns a Twitter account?

Such was the case Wednesday night in Denver, during the first presidential debate, when GOP candidate Mitt Romney said he did not support public funding for PBS. In doing so, he singled out the Sesame Street character Big Bird for special attention.

“I’m gonna stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m gonna stop other things,” Romney said to moderator Jim Lehrer, a television journalist and executive editor of the PBS NewsHour. “I like PBS, I like Big Bird, I actually like you too.”

The comments, and a quickly created Twitter account @FiredBigBird quickly went viral, gaining followers until it was abruptly shut down at noon Thursday.

Why?

The Washington Post reports it was the result of an automatic shut-off function within Twitter. The account was up and running again, then suspended again, according to the story.

According to the Post: “The terms of service for Twitter, however, list 20 reasons why its automatic spam filter might suspend an account, including some that might happen accidentally during a few hours of frenetic tweeting.”

Twitter has come to function as a digital bulletin board or wire service for news events, and we’d hope to see better from the organization. Too many of these sorts of outages could come to be seen as suppression of free speech.

Stacy Meola, a veterinarian practicing in Wheat Ridge, coordinated a five-year study showing the number of dogs in Colorado that got sick as a result of marijuana has quadrupled since medical marijuana was legalized.

That’s unfortunate. People who use medical marijuana need to be careful to keep it out of the hands of children and others, and away from pets. It’s unfair to animals to expose them to marijuana, regardless of whether that exposure was an accident.

In Denver, someone who uses another bank’s ATM will get hit with an average $2.80 surcharge. That’s the highest in the nation. But that same person also will get socked with an average $1.88 fee by their own bank for using a non-network ATM. Combined, that’s an average $4.68 charge. Ouch.

In addition, Denver’s average overdraft fee is $33.60 — again, highest in the nation. The figures come courtesy of Bankrate.com, a financial information web site for consumers.

Sure, banks are going to charge fees to recoup their costs and even make a profit. But this isn’t New York or San Francisco and we think consumers have a right to expect fees more in line with Denver’s relatively modest cost of living.

Celena Hollis was working as a uniformed, off-duty officer at a jazz concert in City Park this summer when she was killed. (handout photo, Denver Police Department)

Even if it’s all true, the defense taking shape for a man accused of killing a Denver police officer illustrates just how senseless the shooting was.

Rollin Oliver, accused of killing Denver Police officer Celena Hollis, was running from a dozen members of the Crips street gang when he spun around and shot four times into a crowd gathered to see a concert in a Denver park, according to statements made Thursday during a court proceeding for Oliver. Police contend one of the bullets hit Hollis.

Public defender William Drexler said his client was not instigating trouble. He was trying to get away from it.

The running from trouble part makes sense — even though it was refuted by a witness at a hearing Thursday — but the gun-firing part does not. Firing a gun into a crowd is likely to make you more of a trouble magnet than repellant. And as we saw, it could have tragic consequences.

Denver’s Landmark Preservation Commission made the right call when its members unanimously shot down an effort by a University of Colorado student to have the old Gates Rubber Co. property landmarked.

The site is a cesspool of contamination, and anything that slows efforts to clean it up and make it ready for re-development is just wasting time.

Eugene Elliott, a CU senior, had ponied up $250 and asked for the designation for three buildings at the site, even though he has almost no connection with the property, unless you count the five times he trespassed to engage in “urban exploring.”

The commission agreed with a staff study, which concluded the site has “low preservation potential.”

Now that this sideshow is concluded, property owners can get on with tearing down the remaining buildings, cleaning up the industrial contamination and marketing the site for redevelopment.

Vincent Carroll is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. He has been writing commentary on politics and public policy in Colorado since 1982 and was originally with the Rocky Mountain News, where he was also editor of the editorial pages until that newspaper gave up the ghost in 2009.

Guidelines: The Post welcomes letters up to 150 words on topics of general interest. Letters must include full name, home address, day and evening phone numbers, and may be edited for length, grammar and accuracy.

To reach the Denver Post editorial page by phone: 303-954-1331

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The idea log The Denver Post editorial board shares commentary and opinion on issues of interest to Coloradans.